Monday brought sad but almost inevitable news: 11-year-old Makayla Sault of Ontario’s New Credit First Nation had passed away of a stroke — the result, her parents say, of chemotherapy treatment she had undergone for leukemia. Far more likely, it was cancer that killed Makalya — cancer that was allowed free rein after she decided, ostensibly of her own volition, to forego further chemo and seek alternative treatments.

Makayla’s story is very similar to that of J.J., an 11-year-old leukemia patient from the same First Nation, who also decided she had had enough of chemo. In both cases, Grand River Child and Family Services intervened, then backed off. In both cases, traditional aboriginal medicine is ostensibly pitted against the Western brand. Not that it’s close. Doctors gave Makayla a 75% chance of survival, and J.J. 90%-95%, with chemotherapy — and almost none with out it.

In J.J.’s case, McMaster Children’s Hospital took the child services agency to court, demanding a judge intervene. Instead, Judge Gethin Edward ruled J.J.’s mother had an “aboriginal right” to “pursue traditional medicine for her daughter.” Citing precedent, he ruled she had established that the practice was “integral to [her community’s] distinctive culture today,” and that it dated from “pre-contact times.”

J.J. and Makayla shared an alternative treatment centre, too: The Hippocrates Health Institute of West Palm Beach, Fla., which treats cancer patients with a regimen of raw food, aromatherapy, “ionic footbaths” and “targeted colour puncture.” It is licensed as a massage clinic.

We take the families’ word that J.J. and Makayla have, in fact, received traditional aboriginal medicine. What Hippocrates peddles is plainly not that — it claims to have set up shop in 1961, some years after Jacques Cartier erected his cross on Gaspé. Furthermore, Makayla’s anti-chemo epiphany arose not from aboriginal beliefs per se but, she claimed, from a vision of Jesus appearing at her bedside and declaring her healed. (Her parents are evangelical pastors.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrF5wWQ4hIU&w=640&h=390]

Were Makayla and J.J. not aboriginal, it is clear what would have happened. When Jehovah’s Witness parents have refused blood transfusions for their children, courts have consistently ruled in support of intervention. It is simply unacceptable that any one group of Canadian children should enjoy less protection. As a matter of urgency, the Ontario government should send Judge Edward’s ruling to the Court of Appeal as a reference case. The stakes are too high to allow it to stand as precedent, and it seems unlikely to survive the appeal.

All rights, aboriginal or otherwise, have limits. Still, no one was questioning J.J.’s mother’s right to pursue traditional aboriginal treatment for her daughter. At issue was her right to deny her daughter Western medicine — a question on which Judge Edward’s ruling is silent.

Taking a sick child away from her parents and forcing medical treatment on her that she doesn’t want is nothing to be taken lightly. But where dialogue and suasion fail — where the child’s life is at stake — it cannot be ruled out. There is no reason aboriginal patients can’t receive traditional treatments at the same time, or under the same roof, as Western medicine. But in clear life-and-death scenarios, when a treatment offers children overwhelming odds of success — as chemotherapy does for leukemia — the latter is not optional.

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/national-post-editorial-board-when-a-childs-life-is-at-stake-the-court-must-intervene/feed2stdmakayla-saultNational Post View: When a child’s life is at stake, the court must intervenehttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/national-post-editorial-board-when-a-childs-life-is-at-stake-the-court-must-intervene-2
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/national-post-editorial-board-when-a-childs-life-is-at-stake-the-court-must-intervene-2#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 13:00:55 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=574468

Monday brought sad but almost inevitable news: 11-year-old Makayla Sault of Ontario’s New Credit First Nation had passed away of a stroke — the result, her parents say, of chemotherapy treatment she had undergone for leukemia. Far more likely, it was cancer that killed Makalya — cancer that was allowed free rein after she decided, ostensibly of her own volition, to forego further chemo and seek alternative treatments.

Makayla’s story is very similar to that of J.J., an 11-year-old leukemia patient from the same First Nation, who also decided she had had enough of chemo. In both cases, Grand River Child and Family Services intervened, then backed off. In both cases, traditional aboriginal medicine is ostensibly pitted against the Western brand. Not that it’s close. Doctors gave Makayla a 75% chance of survival, and J.J. 90%-95%, with chemotherapy — and almost none with out it.

In J.J.’s case, McMaster Children’s Hospital took the child services agency to court, demanding a judge intervene. Instead, Judge Gethin Edward ruled J.J.’s mother had an “aboriginal right” to “pursue traditional medicine for her daughter.” Citing precedent, he ruled she had established that the practice was “integral to [her community’s] distinctive culture today,” and that it dated from “pre-contact times.”

J.J. and Makayla shared an alternative treatment centre, too: The Hippocrates Health Institute of West Palm Beach, Fla., which treats cancer patients with a regimen of raw food, aromatherapy, “ionic footbaths” and “targeted colour puncture.” It is licensed as a massage clinic.

We take the families’ word that J.J. and Makayla have, in fact, received traditional aboriginal medicine. What Hippocrates peddles is plainly not that — it claims to have set up shop in 1961, some years after Jacques Cartier erected his cross on Gaspé. Furthermore, Makayla’s anti-chemo epiphany arose not from aboriginal beliefs per se but, she claimed, from a vision of Jesus appearing at her bedside and declaring her healed. (Her parents are evangelical pastors.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrF5wWQ4hIU&w=640&h=390]

Were Makayla and J.J. not aboriginal, it is clear what would have happened. When Jehovah’s Witness parents have refused blood transfusions for their children, courts have consistently ruled in support of intervention. It is simply unacceptable that any one group of Canadian children should enjoy less protection. As a matter of urgency, the Ontario government should send Judge Edward’s ruling to the Court of Appeal as a reference case. The stakes are too high to allow it to stand as precedent, and it seems unlikely to survive the appeal.

All rights, aboriginal or otherwise, have limits. Still, no one was questioning J.J.’s mother’s right to pursue traditional aboriginal treatment for her daughter. At issue was her right to deny her daughter Western medicine — a question on which Judge Edward’s ruling is silent.

Taking a sick child away from her parents and forcing medical treatment on her that she doesn’t want is nothing to be taken lightly. But where dialogue and suasion fail — where the child’s life is at stake — it cannot be ruled out. There is no reason aboriginal patients can’t receive traditional treatments at the same time, or under the same roof, as Western medicine. But in clear life-and-death scenarios, when a treatment offers children overwhelming odds of success — as chemotherapy does for leukemia — the latter is not optional.

The Florida alternative health centre chosen by two Canadian aboriginal families in lieu of chemotherapy for their children is being sued by a number of former employees who allege the clinic is running a “scam under Florida law.”

“Bottom line, they can’t be playing doctor,” said Ilya Torchinsky, a Miami-based lawyer representing ex-employees of Hippocrates Health Institute.

Based in West Palm Beach, the spa recently became the focus of a high-profile Ontario legal battle over the rights of First Nations parents to treat their cancer-stricken children with unproven alternative remedies.

Earlier this year, a Six Nations family pulled their 11-year-old daughter out of chemotherapy in favour of a non-medical regimen that included a treatment program at Hippocrates costing as much as $18,000.

In response, McMaster Children’s Hospital went to court in a bid to force the girl back in treatment. About 90% of children with her leukemia can be cured with appropriate therapy, experts say, but patients who don’t undergo medical treatment are almost certain to die.

In October, Justice Gethin Edward of the Ontario Court of Justice rejected the hospital’s request, suggesting at one point that McMaster physicians essentially wanted to “impose our world view on First Nation culture.”

Mr. Torchinsky is representing four ex-employees, some of whom are registered nurses, who allege they lost their jobs at Hippocrates Health Institute for objecting to the center’s policy of “enabling unlicensed physicians … to prescribe medication to patients.”

“Their licence is on the line if they’re taking orders from a non-medical professional,” said Mr. Torchinsky, adding that institute director Brian Clement was “overruling doctor’s orders on a daily basis.”

In one case, it is alleged that Mr. Clement blocked staff from calling an ambulance for a critically ill patient.

One plaintiff, Steven Pugh, said in his statement of claim that he lost his job because he “refused to participate in a scam under Florida law by prescribing supplements, etc., by unlicensed persons which is a violation of Florida law.”

WikipediaHippocrates Health Institute founder Ann Wigmore

One plaintiff, nurse Steven Pugh, said in his statement of claim that he lost his job because he “refused to participate in a scam under Florida law by prescribing supplements, etc., by unlicensed persons which is a violation of Florida law.”

While the institute’s website refers to Mr. Clement as “Dr. Brian Clement, PhD,” he has no medical credentials, said Mr. Torchinsky.

The ex-employees’ lawsuit was brought to light in a CBC investigation of the institute.

Although Mr. Clement refused to talk to the network, reporters confronted the director in the institute’s parking lot, asking him whether it was true he had told his clients that leukemia was “not difficult to deal with.”

“I didn’t say that, you’re ridiculous,” he said. “You’re a liar, you’re part of the system, you better learn something before you make allegations.”

In court filings, Hippocrates Health Institute has denied all of the ex-employees’ claims. Lawyers for the institute could not be reached.

Founded more than 50 years ago, Hippocrates offers a wide menu of alternative health remedies including magnets, lasers, colon hydrotherapy and a strict diet of raw food and wheat grass.

In a critique written in response to the Ontario leukemia case, Wayne State University surgical oncologist David Gorski called the institute a “veritable cornucopia of nearly every quackery on the planet.”

Earlier this year, the institute was visited by Makayla Sault, an 11-year-old from Ontario’s New Credit First Nation who had similarly been pulled out of chemotherapy in favour of treating her leukemia with alternative remedies.

At a hearing last month, McMaster oncologist Vicky Breakey testified that Ms. Sault has since suffered a relapse.

The late founder of a Florida alternative health clinic that treated two cancer-stricken Canadian aboriginal girls built her program on the notion that wheat grass holds remarkable healing properties, born out partly by a Bible story and the eating habits of dogs and cats.

Hippocrates Health Institute still extols the virtues of the grass — and at least twice in the past six months its director promoted such theories at a Southern Ontario First Nations community.

Sham-science watchdogs are calling the clinic’s treatments essentially useless, but its message seemed to resonate at the Six Nations reserve and a neighbouring Ojibway community.

WikipediaHippocrates Health Institute founder Ann Wigmore

Parents of the two 11-year-old girls took their children out of chemotherapy and spent thousands of dollars each to be treated at Hippocrates’ lake-side resort in West Palm Beach.

And on Friday, Justice Gethin Edward — who happens to be a member of Six Nations, according to the agenda for a conference there last month — endorsed that decision as an exercise of their constitutional right to seek out “traditional” native medicine.

The families did reportedly turn to aboriginal remedies, as well, but Hippocrates’ founder was from Lithuania, and its current director, Brian Clement, describes himself as a “typical American,” from New Jersey.

Regardless, there appears to be little science to back up the treatments the institute offers, from wheat grass to raw-food diets and “infrared saunas,” said Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, which describes its mission as “separating sense from nonsense.”

“These alternative people tell you about conventional doctors just poisoning you and slashing you, and then they offer a kinder, gentler therapy,” said Prof. Schwarcz, a chemist. “But the problem is the kinder, gentler therapy doesn’t have any evidence behind it.”

David Gorski, a surgical oncologist at Wayne State University, was more pointed in a lengthy article about Hippocrates and the Ontario cases on the Science-based Medicine website.

“Its programs [are] a veritable cornucopia of nearly every quackery on the planet,” wrote Dr. Gorski.

‘Its programs [are] a veritable cornucopia of nearly every quackery on the planet’

However, the mother of one of the girls with leukemia, whose identity is subject to a court-ordered publication ban, strongly defended her decision at a Six Nations event Sunday, saying she had been prepared to flee the country if the court ordered her daughter back into chemotherapy.

And she said the “symphony of treatment” the girl has received since bowing out of chemo is working, the Hamilton Spectator reported.

Makayla Sault, the other young patient, was cancer free when she underwent a blood test last week, despite media reports she had relapsed, said Bryan LaForme, chief of New Credit band, located next door to Six Nations.

“She’s at home and doing fine,” he said, suggesting that media were spreading “misinformation” about her case.

YouTube/Hippocrates Health InstituteThe Hippocrates Health Institute website refers to its director, above, as “Dr. Brian Clement, PhD,” although he has no medical credentials, a lawyer for former employees says.

The clinic that treated both girls has nevertheless faced controversy before for its disease-treating assertions. In the 1980s, when Hippocrates was based in Boston and Mr. Clement was already director, founder Ann Wigmore was twice prosecuted by the Massachusetts attorney general, once for claiming her program could reduce diabetics’ need for insulin and later for suggesting she could cure AIDS. Both claims were withdrawn, according to the American Cancer Society.

More recently, Mr. Clement has led the institute’s “growth and development,” speaking in more than 25 countries, according to the website. That travel has included at least two recent visits to Six Nations, once in May when he talked about “cancer and conquering disease with living foods” and again on Oct. 6.

Doctors say about 90% of such children suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukemia can be cured, but face almost certain death without conventional treatment.

Hippocrates is licensed by the Florida Department of Health only as a massage establishment and its director as a nutrition counsellor. Mr. Clement could not be reached for comment.

Ms. Wigmore, a Lithuanian immigrant, said she was drawn to believe in the curative powers of wheat grass by the Old Testament tale of King Nebuchadnezzar, who spent seven years wandering in a state of insanity, eating grass the whole time and eventually being cured. She also wrote that cats and dogs naturally eat grass when they feel ill.

Her theory was that the “living enzymes” in wheat grass prevent the toxins produced by rotting food in the intestine from causing disease.

Prof. Schwarcz noted that enyzymes are not actually living entities. And the American Cancer Society concluded there is no scientific evidence to support that wheat grass cures or prevents disease.

If Makayla Sault, the gravely ill child who is refusing chemotherapy, is not “a child in need of protection” as a children’s aid society has recently determined, is she nonetheless a youngster in need of a treatment decision?

That is the agonizingly difficult question that remains unanswered.

Certainly in the result, the one body uniquely qualified to make such life-and-death decisions in Ontario — the independent Consent and Capacity Board or CCB — never had a crack at the case.

When the 11-year-old girl, a member of the New Credit First Nation near Hamilton, Ont., and her parents decided to stop chemotherapy after the first round left her so weak she had to be carried around, doctors at McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton reported the matter to Brant Family and Children’s Services, as by law under the Child and Family Services Act they were obligated to do.

A team at the Brant agency, led by executive-director Andy Koster, investigated and quickly decided they would not intervene.

When Mr. Koster spoke to Postmedia earlier this week, he said out of compassion and humanity for the child and her loving parents, the agency decided to back off.

Children’s aid societies in the province regularly go to court — sometimes on an urgent basis — to seek permission to have sick or dying children receive treatment, where they or their parents refuse it.

Meanwhile, officials at the hospital said that they were legally obliged to report the matter to Brant CFS, as doctors believed she needed medical care.

In fact, seven years ago, a doctor from McMaster went to the CCB in the case of an eight-month-old infant who was in a vegetative state, but whose religious parents believed that God would eventually heal him and that he thus should have been kept alive until the miracle happened.

Similarly, in a video she made, pleading her case to be allowed to stop chemotherapy for her acute lymphoblastic leukemia and be treated by an aboriginal healer, Makayla, whose father is a pastor at the New Credit Fellowship Centre, said “I know that what I have can kill me”, but said that Jesus had come into her room one night, “told me that I am healed”, and that she had even seen “the holes” in his hands.

There are other differences between that case — called EJG — and Makayla’s.

The poor baby clearly couldn’t have made a decision about his medical care; he was far too young and too brain-damaged.

But Makayla may well have been deemed by her doctors to be perfectly capable of making her own decision; the presumption is always that people, even young ones, have the right to make their own decisions about their care if they are capable of doing so.

The hospital, bound by patient confidentiality rules, would be unable to say if this was the situation here.

In addition, the baby named EJG was still in hospital, where doctors had access to him, and Makayla is not: Thus, hospital spokeswoman Agnes Bongers said Thursday, “There was no question about whether there [was] a need for protection” from a child-welfare agency in EJG’s case.

“While there may be similarities with any case, each case also has its own distinguishing factors,” she said in an email to Postmedia. “The CCB was not a viable option.”

But absent doubts about the little girl’s capacity to make such an enormous decision, Makayla’s doctors could have taken the case directly to the CCB, whose 142 full and part-time members number among them dozens and dozens of lawyers and psychiatrists, some with specialties in ethics, as well as laymen with experience in everything from aboriginal matters to health care.

Had they done so, a quick hearing would have been guaranteed — the board is legislated to start the hearing within seven days of receiving a case and decisions must be rendered within a day after a hearing ends, even on weekends.

In addition, a CCB hearing wouldn’t have meant Makayla was wrenched from the bosom of her family and traumatized, the spectre that so haunted Mr. Koster at the Brant children’s aid.

As he put it earlier this week, “We have to bring her into care so we can force chemotherapy on her?”

What was most evident in Mr. Koster’s voice was what Mark Handelman, a former member of the CCB and now a Toronto lawyer in private practice with a specialty in health matters and bioethics, calls the “moral distress” such cases cause.

The presumption is always that people, even young ones, have the right to make their own decisions about their care if they are capable of doing so

Mr. Handelman, who left the board in 2008 after 10 years, said the little girl’s treatment team likely would have been in agony over her situation, knowing they could probably save her.

Makayla suffers from a variant of leukemia called “Philadelphia chromosome-positive”, which affects only three to five per cent of those stricken with the most common childhood cancer.

Until recently, the prognosis for these children was grim, but the advent of a new, smart bullet-type drug, in conjunction with aggressive chemo, has resulted in good outcomes for 70% of those with the variant.

That’s part of the difficulty for doctors and workers at the children’s aid: Wanting to keep the child alive, knowing her wishes and assuming she has the capacity to know the consequences, what should they do?

Adding to the miasma of doubt is that virtually nothing is known about the traditional therapy — called “Ongwehowe Onongwatri:yo:” — her family has said she’s getting from a healer at Six Nations, a reserve near her own.

Details of the treatment are considered protected knowledge, and no research on any of the practices has ever been done.

Postmedia’s requests for any information about it — from either the office of the “aboriginal patient navigators” at the hospital or from Dr. Malcolm King, head of the Institute of Aboriginal Peoples’ Health (an arm of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research) — have gone unanswered and unacknowledged.

As Mr. Handleman put it, with considerable understatement, “These are very tough questions.”

It’s the rare story where almost everyone — almost — has acquitted themselves with honour, but such is the case of Makayla Sault.

She’s the 11-year-old from the New Credit First Nation in southern Ontario who is stricken with an unusual form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL, the most common childhood cancer, and who has been in the news of late as she and her family fought to stop her chemotherapy treatments in favour of traditional native medicine.

She and her parents won that battle this week when the local children’s aid society, Brant Family and Children’s Services, closed its investigation, ending the threat of a possible apprehension and allowing Makayla and her parents, Ken and Sonya, to proceed as they wish.

As Andy Koster, the agency’s executive director, puts it, his decision wasn’t a medical one, but a humane one.

Makayla’s family is loving and close, he said; she had been through the mill already with the first round of aggressive chemotherapy, and the little girl herself is bright and had begun work on a formal declaration of her wishes.

“What are we going to do — take her away from her loving family?” Mr. Koster wondered aloud in a telephone interview Wednesday. “We have to bring her into care so we can force chemotherapy on her?”

He said he recognized “I wasn’t going to be able to base this decision on whether traditional medicine works. I don’t know the relative merits of it.” Rather, he said, he based it on Makayla’s emotional and spiritual needs.

It was a kind decision, rare in a world where children’s aid societies have been less than quick to respect the cultural values and traditions of other groups, such as the Mexican Mennonites (where in 2002 Child and Family Services of St. Thomas and Elgin County seized seven of the most ridiculously hale youngsters you ever saw from fundamentalist Christian parents whose church advocated physical discipline) or, more recently, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Lev Tahor sect (where last year the Chatham-Kent Children’s Services launched a court battle to seize custody of 14 children and return them to Quebec, where they had been originally ordered into foster care amid allegations of abuse and, well, cultish behaviour).

Dave Chidley/The Canadian PressMembers of the Lev Tahor ultra-orthodox Jewish community drew the ire of Quebec Children's Aid in early 2014.

The Brant agency had been called in by doctors at McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton. The doctors, like all professionals who work with children, have the hard-and-fast legal obligation to alert child-welfare authorities when a child is at risk.

The doctors at McMaster did their job — a different job — equally well.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is a big success story in the cancer world.

In 1962, the long-term survival rate was about 5%; now, over all, between 85% and 90% of these patients make it.

But Makayla has an unusual form of ALL called “Philadelphia chromosome-positive” which is present in only between 3% and 5% of children with the disease and which has been one of the stubborn subsets, with grim prognoses.

But in 2009, a team of researchers led by Canadian Dr. Kirk Schultz at British Columbia’s Children’s Hospital added a little something to the normal protocol of chemotherapy — one of the new, smart, bullet-type drugs called imatinib.

With intensive dosing of that, as well as intensive chemotherapy, the team more than doubled what’s called in clinical trials “event free survival” – meaning, no recurrence or spread of the disease — for children and teenagers with Philadelphia chromosome-positive ALL.

Virtually no research on any of the traditional native medicine practices, whatever they may be, has ever been done

And just earlier this year, after a longer-term follow-up to that study using the same double-whammy of regular chemo and imatinib, the team reported in the Leukemia journal that happy outcomes for those with Makayla’s type of ALL jumped from about 25% to 70%.

In other words, her doctors at McMaster had good reason to believe she has a real shot at beating this thing — and that stopping the treatment, after only one round, would put her at risk.

Enter traditional native medicine, the efficacy of which is entirely unknown. The little girl’s family has said she will be treated via “Ongwehowe Onongwatri: yo:”, delivered by a traditional healer from Six Nations, a reserve near her own. Details of the treatment are considered “protected knowledge,” passed down only orally, and virtually no research on any of the practices, whatever they may be, has ever been done, and no scientific literature exists.

In the week or so between the time the hospital called children’s aid, and the Brant agency’s decision to close the file, there was much talk about the family’s and the first nation’s need to protect their rights and about culturally appropriate treatments. A “Makayla defence force” even sprang up, lest authorities attempt to intervene and remove her from her family. One native official suggested that staff at McMaster should receive cultural competency training.

No one would wish anything but a full recovery for this little girl, and the institutions involved — the hospital, the children’s aid — and her parents have all acted in what they believe is her best interests.

But if any of the parties need training in cultural competency, it would be the traditional healers whose culture isn’t in doubt, but whose competency very much is.

Ontario Children’s Aid officials have closed their investigation into the family of a girl who is refusing chemotherapy treatment, effectively leaving it up to the 11-year-old to decide her own care.

“The more we looked at it we realized that this is a warm, loving family,” said Andy Koster, executive director of the Children’s Aid Society of Brant. “We don’t believe that bringing her into care, taking her away from that family — which is her support — and forcing chemotherapy, is going to be in any way emotionally sound for her, or psychologically or even spiritually.”

The Children’s Aid Society intervened after Makayla Sault, an 11-year-old New Credit First Nation girl, decided to treat her cancer with native medicine rather than chemotherapy.

Mr. Koster said he met with the girl’s parents and community members on Tuesday. Mr. Koster said the group was “very pleased” to hear the news that the agency was closing its intake file.

“This is a family that’s been under a lot of stress. It’s a very tragic situation in terms of her illness and we just don’t wish to make it worse,” he said.

Makayla is suffering from a unique form of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, the most common form of childhood cancer. Under proper treatment, it has a survivability rate as high as 80% for children.

Related

The girl’s disease went into remission after undergoing an initial 11 weeks of chemotherapy at McMaster Children’s Hospital. Treatments were planned to continue but she asked to stop chemotherapy after she experienced severe side effects such as nausea, loss of appetite and weight loss.

In an email to the National Post, the hospital said health-care professionals have a legal obligation to alert authorities when they believe a child may be at risk.

Mr. Koster said Makayla’s “voice had to be heard.”

“Under our Child and Family Services act we have to recognize the traditions and the community of First Nations people who are given rights under the act,” he said.

Mr. Koster said the agency was given legal advice on the case and that it was not difficult to come to the final decision.

When asked if he was concerned about backlash from the public regarding the agency’s decision, Mr. Koster said: “We can live with the decision we made.”

Nahnda Garlow, who has been acting as the Sault family’s spokeswoman, described the family’s reaction to the new to Two Row Times newspaper. “Makayla’s family members embraced one another with happy tears and the youth of the New Credit First Nation came together to sing honour songs for the family.”

A New Credit First Nation family’s decision to let their 11-year-old treat her cancer with Indigenous medicine rather than chemotherapy has prompted the intervention of Ontario children’s aid authorities.

“This chemo that I am on is killing my body and I cannot take it anymore,” said the girl, who cannot be named due to the involvement of provincial authorities, in a Tuesday video produced by Two Row Times, a free weekly distributed to Ontario First Nations reservations.

“I have asked my mom and dad to take me off the treatment, because I don’t want to go this way any more.“

Instead, the girl’s only treatment for the disease will be a regimen of Six Nations traditional medicines and treatments known as Ongwehowe Onongwatri:yo:.

McMaster Children’s Hospital, where the girl received chemotherapy, “didn’t seem to have protocol in place for indigenous children whose families choose traditional medicine instead of pharmaceuticals,” said Nahnda Garlow, a Two Row Times correspondent now acting as a spokesperson for the family, writing in a Wednesday email to the National Post.

“For the hospital to pump her full of pharmaceuticals and then degrade her spiritual experience is the exact opposite way of [her] culture.”

“All in all, it’s a very tragic situation,” said Andy Koster, executive director of the Children’s Aid Society of Brant. “We have to decide as an agency how we wish to handle this.”

‘I have asked my mom and dad to take me off the treatment, because I don’t want to go this way any more’

As a first step, the agency is currently arranging a meeting with members of the New Credit First Nation and said they will act in “a sensitive way, but also in a way that means that we’re doing our job as well.”

The girl is suffering from a unique form of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood cancer. Under proper treatment, it has a survivability rate as high as 80% for children.

The girl underwent an initial 11 weeks of chemotherapy at McMaster, after which the disease went into remission. Due to severe side effects such as nausea, loss of appetite and weight loss, however, the girl asked that she be allowed out of future chemotherapy treatments.

Ms. Garlow said the decision prompted a tense confrontation with McMaster oncologists.

“The … family told me that [the hospital’s lead oncologist] repeatedly used derogatory language … regarding traditional medicines, calling them ‘100% ineffective’ and ‘anyone who says traditional medicine works should be thrown in jail,’” she said.

The girl also said she was personally healed in a visit by Jesus Christ, prompting hospital staff to respond that she was delusional.

“Jesus came into my room, and he told me not to be afraid, so if I live or if I die I am not afraid,” the girl said in Tuesday’s video.

The girl is the daughter of a well-known local pastor, and on May 5 related the encounter before a crowd of several hundred at a Sarnia, Ont. evangelical gathering hosted by U.S. televangelist Ted Shuttlesworth.

‘For the hospital to pump her full of pharmaceuticals and then degrade her spiritual experience is the exact opposite way of [her] culture’

“Her faith has been a constant source of strength throughout this great struggle,” wrote her father in a May 9 Facebook post. “She told of her spiritual encounter with Jesus when he entered her hospital room and how everything began to turn around from that point on.”

McMaster Children’s Hospital was unable to comment on the case due to patient confidentiality.

Nevertheless, in a Wednesday statement to the National Post, the hospital wrote that they are legally bound to alert authorities when they observe a child to be at risk.

“Health care professionals have a legal obligation to notify the Children’s Aid Society when any child requires medical treatment to cure, prevent or alleviate physical harm or suffering, and the child’s parent is unable, does not or refuses to consent to the treatment,” they wrote.

In previous Canadian cases where parents have refused to allow potentially lifesaving medical care to their children for religious reasons, medical authorities have been successful at having the children removed.

Most famously, in 2007 the B.C. Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Vancouver arranged the seizure od four premature babies from a Jehovah’s Witness couple who had refused to allow blood transfusions to be given to the newborns.

Mr. Koster, who says his agency has a good relationship with New Credit First Nation, said they are nowhere near that stage.

“Hopefully, we can come up with something collaborative that can take the best interests of this child into consideration but also the perspective of the First Nation.”

The executive director added that this is the first case he has encountered in which a First Nations family has eschewed hospital care for religious reasons.

Adrian Wyld/The Canadian PressGordon Peters, Grand Chief of the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians: “Never again will our children be taken away from us.”

The chief of the New Credit First Nation did not respond to National Post requests for comment, but earlier this month the girl’s case prompted a letter of support from Gordon Peters, Grand Chief of the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians.

“Caring for our young ones is the responsibility of the parents and the community, and any infringement of that jurisdiction will not be tolerated,” he wrote. “Never again will our children be taken away from us.”

The case has also prompted the formation of a “Defense Force” of local First Nations who are prepared to “peacefully intervene” if authorities should attempt to take the girl from her family, said Ms. Garlow.

The exact details of Ongwehowe Onongwatri:yo: are considered “protected knowledge,” said Ms. Garlow, but she said it involves “herbs and other physical medicines but includes spiritual things such as faith, and love, and rest included in the treatments.”

North American cancer societies are generally supportive of Aboriginal medicine, but never as an outright replacement for scientifically tested treatments.

“Although First Nations traditional healing practices have been valued by their people for as long as oral tradition has been alive, there is virtually no research on the effectiveness of these methods,” reads a write-up on First Nations medicine prepared the Canadian Cancer Society.

On its website, the American Cancer Society similarly dismisses claims that “Native American healing can cure cancer or any other disease,” but praises its “physical, emotional, and spiritual benefits.”

“Pioneering Ontario clinic hopes to make naturopathy mainstream” is the headline that the Globe & Mail newspaper put on a Wednesday article, detailing the Brampton Naturopathic Teaching Clinic, described as “the first naturopathic clinic inside a hospital in Canada.” Given the pseudoscientific nature of naturopathic medicine, the term “pioneering” is an odd one here — unless the author was wryly referencing the primitive level of medical knowledge available to the 17th-century pioneers who explored the territory on which the Brampton Naturopathic Teaching Clinic eventually would be built.

The term “naturopathy” includes a large variety of treatments, theories and medicines. All of them generally share the common characteristic of being either well-intentioned placebos involving minerals, vitamins and “botanicals,” or full-blown faux-medical scams that are actually quite dangerous. Sticking needles in one’s skin at arbitrarily designated spots on the body is naturopathy. So is “colour therapy” — which involved shining different colours of light on your body in hopes of balancing one’s “energy” levels. (All naturopaths are big on the idea that our bodies are animated by some sort of mystical life force — like the Jedi in Star Wars.) Naturopathic “iridologists” claim they can diagnose conditions all over your body just by looking at the squiggly patterns in your eye’s iris. Naturopathic colonic irrigators treat patients by … well, let’s just skip that one. And then there’s the fun-to-pronounce, but completely pseudoscientific “homeopathy,” which postulates the magical idea that a molecule or two of some harmful substance, contained in a massively diluted solution, somehow will cure the ailments associated with diseases caused by an excess of aforesaid substance. It’s like saving flood victims by squirting them in the face with a water pistol.

Why anyone — let alone the usually staid Globe & Mail — would want to celebrate the legitimization of naturopathy is beyond understanding. The 4,000-plus medical staff at the Brampton Civic Hospital, where the Brampton Naturopathic Teaching Clinic is located, operate an ER, a cardiac-care center, an oncology department, and other medical services that save people’s lives through the application of state-of-the-art, scientific, evidence-based, peer-reviewed medical standards. Now these accredited medical professionals are sharing their facility with a bunch of placebo doctors. How does this use of limited financial resources advance the cause of quality health care?

The larger problem here is that Ontario, like several other provinces, is set to give naturopaths a semblance of medical respectability by allowing them to requisition lab tests and prescribe some varieties of drugs. Politically, this is seen as a win — because the constituency that endorses naturopathy tends to be passionate and active; while the majority just see it as harmless quackery, and so aren’t likely to object one way or the other.

But this is a mistake: The line between science and pseudoscience is a very real and important one. It’s the line we depend on, from a public-health perspective, when doctors assure parents that vaccines don’t cause autism. It’s the line we depend on when doctors tell their patients that, no, those mail-order vitamins they bought on the internet won’t negate the effects of smoking. Any move that serves to blur that line is a move that, indirectly at least, endangers public health.

What’s worse, this being Canada, it is only a matter of time before government is called upon to fully fund naturopathic pseudoscience as if it were legitimate medicine. As things now stand, Canadians generally must pay out-of-pocket for their needles, chelation treatments, weird colon cleanses, iris readings, and brainwave-changing gadgets. But if governments and hospitals promote the notion that this nonsense actually works, why wouldn’t advocates claim that it falls under the Canada Health Act, along with dialysis and chemotherapy?

Admittedly, the miraculous cures provided by modern medical science cannot cure every condition. And so it is natural that, humans being the hopeful and superstitious creatures they are, would seek out their own “alternative” remedies. They should be free to do so. But the rest of us, and especially our government and mainstream medical community, should not be made to support, fund or legitimize therapies that have no proven benefit — except, in financial form, to those who provide them.

A Calgary mother is facing charges of negligence and failure to provide the necessities of life in connection with the death of her seven-year-old son, who died of a treatable bacterial infection in March.

According to police, the boy was bedridden for 10 days before his death, however, the mother declined to seek medical treatment, relying instead on homeopathic remedies and herbal medicines.

“It should absolutely serve as a warning to other parents,” said Calgary Police Service Staff Sergeant Michael Cavilla. “The message is quite simple: If your child is sick, take them to see a doctor.”

Police said they arrested the 44-year-old woman on Friday; charges are pending. She cannot be named until she is formally charged.
According to Sgt. Cavilla, the boy looked poorly before he died and several of the mother’s friends had advised her to seek a doctor. In the early morning on the day of his death, she phoned 9-1-1; paramedics arrived to find the child in cardiac arrest. He was later pronounced dead.

It should absolutely serve as a warning to other parents

An autopsy concluded he had a Group A streptococcal infection that could have been treated with penicillin.

The police said they have no medical records for the boy prior to his death. The child had recently been enrolled in a local school. Prior to January of this year, he had been home-schooled.

“We have no direct information that religious beliefs factored into this, but there was a belief system and homeopathic medicine did factor in,” Sgt. Cavilla said.

The mother has one older child who does not live with her. She is estranged from the father of the deceased boy.

Related

The family live in an older, squat apartment along the trendy 17th Ave. SW of Calgary, a strip replete with coffee shops and bars. Home to a Tarot card shop and used clothing store, the block is a close-knit community, according to a neighbour and friend of the family.

Jon-David Walmsley said the boy was an outgoing, energetic child who would bring him and his roommate the mail. He was the only child in the building and loved the Incredible Hulk comics, he said.

“We’re in each other’s business. There’s a lot of cookie sharing and bringing down meals and stuff,” the friend said, noting the accused was an attentive and well-regarded mother. Everyone was shocked by the boy’s death.

“It put a dark cloud over the building,” Mr. Walmsley said. “She was a fantastic mom, and I can’t believe anybody would say otherwise. It’s very surprising.”

He was one of the most wonderful little boys

The child’s grandfather, a well-known political organizer named Donn Lovett, said he was shocked by the charges. The family has hired a lawyer, Mr. Lovett said, noting there were discrepancies between the police’s claims and the medical record he had been provided.

Notably, he said, the child died only four days after falling ill, not 10. Mr. Lovett also said his daughter was a diligent parent.
Oddly, Mr. Lovett said, a friend of his fell ill with the same rare infection at the same time. She survived.

“I had seen [the boy] the week before and I was supposed to see him on the Monday. My daughter said he was in bed with the flu,” Mr. Lovett said. “On the Wednesday and Thursday, she sent me a note saying he was feeling better and would probably be going to school tomorrow.”

His grandfather also said the boy was a gifted artist, and frequently participated in community art shows.

“[He] was one of the most wonderful little boys you can imagine. I did spend a lot of time with him. I have a baseball that I gave him, which I asked my daughter to give back to me to carry in the car. I speak to him every day. He was full of life.”

Tim Caulfield, a scholar and Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy, said cases like this are tragic and increasingly common.

“The interest in and demand for complementary and alternative medicine continues to grow. There are many factors driving this trend, including suspicion of conventional medicine and ‘Big Pharma.'”

He said this has resulted in an increase in measles outbreaks due to vaccination fears, and the growth in popularity of naturopathic practitioners, who often prescribe ineffective homeopathic remedies.

“Alternative medicine is associated with many risks,” he said. Supplements often don’t contain what they proclaim on the label and herbal remedies can interact with conventional medicine.

Consider the $8 box of crackers. They are not particularly remarkable crackers — ingredients include grains, oil, salt. They are not even that good. They taste like cardboard. But then, something in the taste of nothing tells me that I have done something right — good for me, for my family, for the people who picked the cracker’s “ancient grains,” for the state of grain itself. I have not spent an insane packet on unleavened bread that in most stores would cost half of what I paid. I have done the day’s good deed.

I am about to be out of debt for the first time in a few years. It’s going to happen in July. The coming yoke-removal has had a paradoxical effect on me in that while usually I think of spending, now, I am thinking of saving. I don’t want to be in the hole again. So I have dug deeply into my shoebox of receipts and bills — a box which I am usually afraid of, because it snarls at me from the corner of the room — to see what I could find.

What I found, more often than almost any other small piece of paper with a number on it, were receipts from the health food store near my house, ground zero for such modern abominations as the $8 cracker box.

That this nice, brown, nubbly shop could have such an evil effect on my pocketbook is oddly unexpected

That this nice, brown, nubbly shop — a place with a bulletin board tacked with flyers for mindfulness courses and dog walkers and community compost initiatives — could have such an evil effect on my pocketbook is oddly unexpected. It’s not that I don’t know that under its friendly, tie-dyed tarpaulin lie small boxes of black licorice that cost five dollars and bags of kale chips that cost six – it’s that my response to this information is entirely off kilter, to the point of needing a bit of investigation.

Like, why, when I walk into this place, does it not register that I am walking into a luxury goods shop? I never walk into the health-food store feeling like I am in a store for very rich people (which is how I feel at the jewel-like gourmet shop a bit farther down the street, where lumps of tartare-grade beef sit like ruby clusters behind glass, and barrels overflow with sophisticated black plums imported exclusively from France). But if we are to equate luxury with cost here, then the health food store is the fanciest place in town — mouldy bulk bins and open tubs of tofu notwithstanding.

Please don’t think I am getting into a screed against the organic, the non-GMO, the non-processed. I know there are many who think all that stuff is a total racket, but I am not one of them.

I don’t believe that everything that says it is organic is actually organic

In the organic, for instance, I am a believer, albeit with caveat: I don’t believe that everything that says it is organic is actually organic. But I do believe that if it were truly free of hormones, pesticides and all of the other so-called “nasties,” it would be a healthier product than its non-organic alternative. So for my daughter — especially for my daughter — I throw four dollars at the box of Annie’s macaroni and cheese in the hope that the company that stuck the claims on the thing is the real deal, and not working within some USDA grey area to milk more dollars.

Because these natural outlets — be it one of the behemoths like Whole Foods, or the mom and pops, like the store near my house — have their own, special blinders. These used to be shops where people in sandals who drank chicory coffee bought giant bags of carob. Now, they can seem more like places that specialize in catching the dual horns of guilt and hope that make up the current take on self-betterment (you don’t need a doctor; you just need a more natural existence).

So here are emporiums lined with supplements that often claim to boost only the good, and natural remedies said to dash only the bad. Here are aisles of foods that have powers you should have long known about. Low energy? Blueberry juice! Too stressed? Valerian root. Hair falling out? Coconut oil. Still falling out? Virgin coconut oil! Anything having to do with skin? Calendula will save your hide. There are very often no clinical trials, and yet, as the shop’s in-house naturopath might tell you, all those trials are rigged by corporations anyway. And people have used calendula for centuries. What more proof do you need?

Neurosis is a word which can be applied more and more to our feelings about our food and drug sources

Not knowing can easily lead to neurosis. And neurosis is a word which can be applied more and more to our feelings about our food and drug sources. The rampant spread of food allergies, especially in children, has created an understandable climate of fear. I am always checking my 18-month-old for reactions, looking at her hands and feet and eyes after eating fish or berries or nuts. A few weeks ago I made muffins and she ate two and then broke out in hives, and instead of listening to the doctor, who said it was a virus, I cleared the cupboard of all gluten, sure that the issue was actually a wheat allergy. (It wasn’t. It was probably a virus.)

So in this very complex world of food, simplicity has become a luxury. I see now that what I pay for more than anything else at the health-food store are premium priced packages of less-is-more: breakfast cereal with three ingredients rather than 17, soup made with veggies and water and nothing else. These are foods that in pretty much any other age, would be the cheapest. But in ours, no, if only because they make up the opposite of the pile-it-on, diabetic culture that gives us things like Ranch Dipped Hot Wings Doritos.

I suppose the budget solution is to make more of my own things. For produce, I could also do what my brother, a chemist who rarely buys organic, does: he adds a drop of plain, non-perfumed liquid soap to the water when washing his fruit and vegetables. He says no pesticide can really survive that. But your wallet can.

Canada’s biggest medical regulator has toughened up a sympathetic new policy on acupuncture, homeopathy and other alternative medicine after sharp criticism from some physicians, who complained the proposed rules undermined the principle of science-based health care.

The revised version of the guidelines — to be voted on by the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) Tuesday — now emphasizes doctors should employ only treatments founded on good evidence and apply the same standards of proof to all kinds of therapies.

Critics who considered the policy too liberal say it still all but prohibits doctors from voicing skepticism about unproven non-conventional remedies. Others worry physicians performing alternative medicine will continue to face “heavy-handed” scrutiny.

Related

The college posted its draft policy over the summer and drew almost 700 submissions from doctors, other health practitioners and lay people, one of the largest responses to a regulatory proposal it has ever received.

As the most detailed policy on the issue in Canada, coming from the most populous province, it could influence the agenda elsewhere, too, some observers say.

Briefing notes for the council acknowledge the new draft will not please everyone, given the contradictory input from those on differing sides of the debate.

“It does encourage physicians to keep lines of communication open with patients who pursue these practices,” noted Jill Hefley, a college spokeswoman. “Hopefully, in the final policy, we’ve found the right balance.”

The new policy proposal was drafted to recognize what some see as growing popularity of “complementary and alternative” health care in Canada, from herbal medicine to naturopathy and chiropractic.

In its original form, it said doctors should respect patients’ wishes to try non-conventional care and require “sound evidence,” but not necessarily clinical trials, to back up any alternative treatments they use.

Critics included the Canadian Medical Association, which said the policy should emphasize the lack of science behind some of the therapies. A group representing allergy doctors warned it could give credence to practitioners who lure asthmatics away from life-saving treatment. Others, including the organization that oversees Canada’s medical specialists, said the policy was, if anything, too restrictive.

By contrast, the B.C. college’s policy states simply that alternative therapies are generally unproven and recommending them without good evidence is unethical.

The new iteration of the Ontario draft suggests everything a doctor does should be informed by “evidence and science.” It removes a suggestion the type of evidence required to justify a therapy depends on the nature of the treatment. It also removes a statement that seemed to allow doctors to employ therapies whose effectiveness and safety are unknown, so long as they act “in a cautious and ethical manner.”

The changes are a step forward, but the policy still prevents doctors from voicing any “non-clinical” judgments about alternative health care unless requested by patients, said Iain Martel of the Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism. That could hamstring physicians when patients choose a non-conventional treatment that seems unscientific.

“Alternative-medicine practitioners are open to make all sorts of claims that are unfounded,” he added. “Doctors have far better training … and far greater medical knowledge, but they’re being told to keep silent about this debate.”

On the other hand, a spokesman for a pro-alternative-medicine physicians group said the revised policy, while an improvement, still could leave such doctors open to unfair investigation and prosecution by the college. As it is, doctors who do non-conventional care seem to be unduly targeted by the regulator, said Dr. Craig Appleyard, spokesman for the Ontario Society of Physicians for Complementary Medicine.

“We want to have a policy that is going to govern us and set some standards, but at the same time is not over-bearing,” he said. “It’s not an equitable or fair system right now. The investigations tend to be heavy-handed … They come and survey patient charts at random, which is probably a violation of privacy legislation.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/ontario-medical-college-votes-for-tougher-scrutiny-for-alternative-medicine/feed1stdA new stance on alternative treatment by the Ontario doctors’ college may influence policy across Canada.Blackwell on Health: Did use of alternative medicine cut short Jobs’ life?http://news.nationalpost.com/news/blackwell-on-health-did-use-of-alternative-medicine-cut-short-jobs-life
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/blackwell-on-health-did-use-of-alternative-medicine-cut-short-jobs-life#commentsFri, 14 Oct 2011 19:06:34 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=100125

A medical research associate at Harvard University is creating some buzz with a provocative thesis: that Steve Jobs died too soon because he delayed medical treatment for his pancreatic cancer while undergoing natural health therapies. Others are already saying the blogger is plain wrong.

Writing on the Quora question-and-answer site, Ramzi Amri stressed that he has no personal knowledge of the Apple founder’s case nor was he involved in his treatment. But he says he has spent more than a year studying the type of malignancy that Jobs suffered, called neuorendocrine pancreatic cancer, which is considered to be the less virulent form of the disease. The much more common type – adenocarcinoma, accounting for 95% of cases – typically kills quickly after diagnosis.

Neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer, on the other hand, has been shown to have a survival rate after 10 years of as much as 100% – if the tumour is surgically removed as soon as possible, argues Mr. Amri, a Fullbright scholar. Media reports, though, have suggested that Mr. Jobs, who was a Buddhist, tried various natural cures for the first several months, before finally undergoing the fairly radical “Whipple” procedure to remove part of his pancreas and duodenum, according to Mr. Amri. He later had a liver transplant.

Said the Harvard researcher:

While Mr. Jobs was trying all sorts of alternative mumbo-jumbo … his tumor grew, and grew, and grew.

The situation raises difficult questions for medical professionals, Mr. Amri says, as patients are obviously free to choose the treatment they prefer, even if the evidence suggests it will not work.

His views are not shared by all experts, however. In a detailed response to Mr. Amri’s statement on the Quora site, Adam Brufsky, an oncologist at the University of Pittsburgh, offered detailed reasons for why Mr. Jobs’ disease would have progressed the way it did – that have nothing to do with delaying surgery. Said Dr. Brufsky:

Whether he used alternative therapies or not had absolutely no effect on his survival or outcome — that was dictated from day one by his tumor and its biology, and our lack of effective therapies for this condition.

A proposal by Ontario’s medical regulator to take a more liberal approach to homeopathy, acupuncture and other alternative health care has drawn sharp criticism from some national doctors’ groups, who warn the draft rules mark a shift away from scientifically backed treatment.

Others are applauding the more inclusive tone adopted by the College of Physicians and Surgeons, whose suggested policy highlights a growing, if controversial, legitimacy around non-conventional health care in Canada.

The Ontario college, which licenses and disciplines physicians in the province, said it decided to revisit its policy partly because of the apparent increase in popularity of alternative care. The new document says doctors should respect patients’ wishes to try non-conventional care, avoid expressing personal judgments of alternative medicine and require “sound evidence” but not necessarily clinical trials to back up any alternative treatments they use.

The B.C. college, in contrast, says in its policy on the issue that alternative therapies are generally unproven and that recommending them without good evidence is unethical.

In one of numerous submissions to the Ontario regulator, the Canadian Medical Association criticizes the policy for allowing doctors to sell potentially questionable alternative-health treatments, and not stressing the lack of evidence behind such treatments.

The group representing Canada’s allergy doctors blasts the college for failing to note that people may be foregoing crucial, scientifically backed treatment and risking serious harm when they use dubious alternative care.

“This is a very serious issue,” said Dr. Stuart Carr, president of the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

“In a day when we have incredibly effective, and almost universally safe, treatment approaches for people with asthma, the idea we would either delay or avoid those options for completely unproven or sometimes disproven approaches is frankly unacceptable.”

Allergy doctors regularly see patients who have undergone tests that falsely diagnose food allergies, leading to disruptive and needless dietary changes, and ineffective treatments for asthma that allow permanent lung damage to occur, said Dr. Carr.

Underlying conflict over the Ontario policy is a general move toward official acceptance of what is often called “complementary and alternative medicine,” despite continuing criticism in some quarters that it is founded more on belief than empirical proof.

Under Health Canada’s seven-year-old program for regulating natural-health products, for instance, many remedies have been approved based on their traditional use over the centuries, and other evidence that is much less rigorous than required for prescription drugs.

In Ontario, the law was changed recently to officially recognize homeopaths, naturopaths and Chinese medical practitioners as health professions with their own, self-regulating colleges. B.C. has done the same for naturopathy and Chinese medicine and in 2009 gave naturopaths drug-prescribing rights.

A little-noticed poll commissioned by Health Canada last year suggested 73% of Canadians have used natural-health products.

Proponents of alternative medicine argue that its potential risks are far less than those of prescription drugs, surgery and other conventional procedures, and their efficacy difficult to prove with randomized clinical trials that can cost millions of dollars to conduct.

The Ontario Association of Naturopathic Doctors praises the Ontario college’s draft policy, saying it counters the tendency now for many medical doctors to express personal biases against naturopathic care and discourage patients from seeking it.

“Oftentimes when physicians have a [negative] comment about naturopathic medicine, it’s usually due to misinformation,” said Leigh Arseneau, a spokesman for the association. “The more they understand what we do, the more likely they are to work with us.”

Even some medical bodies, including the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, which regulates medical specialists, told the college that parts of the policy are, if anything, too restrictive toward alternative medicine.

The Ontario Society of Physicians for Complementary Medicine goes further, blasting the draft rules as exhibiting a “deep and trenchant hostility” toward non-conventional medicine, arguing that much of mainstream health care itself does not have top-quality scientific evidence proving that it works.

College directors will discuss the feedback and the shape of the final policy in November, said Jill Hefley, a spokeswoman for the regulator.

A new study of more than 50 Canadian naturopaths concludes the popular alternative-health professionals mostly promote remedies that have no proven scientific validity.

Treatments and tests such as homeopathy, chellation and colon cleanses figure prominently on the naturopaths’ websites, yet research suggests they have little value beyond the placebo effect, concludes the review by a prominent University of Alberta health-policy professor.

The findings call into question the practitioners’ repeated claims that their work is based on empirical evidence, says the paper spearheaded by Timothy Caulfield, holder of the university’s Canada research chair in health law and policy.

“This review of what they advertise as their core services paints a picture of a profession that has embraced practices that are remarkably unscientific,” the authors conclude in the journal Allergy, Asthma and Clinical Immunology.

“The profession should not just use the language of science, it must embrace and act on the conclusions of scientific inquiry.”

The researchers looked at the websites of 53 naturopaths in Alberta and British Columbia, identifying the most commonly promoted services. They include homeopathy, which uses solutions where active ingredients have been diluted to molecular-scale concentrations.

The preponderance of studies has shown them to be ineffective, the paper says.

A representative for naturopaths in Ontario, however, argues there is ample evidence supporting the effectiveness of homeopathy, and that generally the practitioners base their treatment on good research.

“This is a very common misconception,” Leigh Arseneau said about the study’s critique.

“When you pile all the levels of evidence that we use — epidemiological evidence, cohort studies, systemic reviews, randomized controlled trials — when you pile all the evidence together, there is a sea of evidence we use in a very patient-centred manner.”